Peter Foster is the Telegraph's US Editor based in Washington DC. He moved to America in January 2012 after three years based in Beijing, where he covered the rise of China. Before that, he was based in New Delhi as South Asia correspondent. He has reported for The Telegraph for more than a decade, covering two Olympic Games, 9/11 in New York, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the post-conflict phases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Prostitution of a paper

Thanks for all those fascinating responses to the reservations row a subject I'm planning to return to in the print edition of the paper.

A quick item that I noticed on page three of today's Times of India which absolutely astonished me.

Under a news story about Board Examination results is a 'story' headlined "Rush for Amity University Forms shows preference for professional degrees". The story has a byline and is a font identical to all the other stories on the same page.

As I read the 'story' I couldn't understand why the journalist was producing such a shameless puff/advert for the Amity University brand. No other University was given so much of a mention to justify this apparent trend.

However it was only right at the end that I understood what was going on when the last word was, in small print, 'Advt'.

All newspapers have to make ends meet, but this blurring of genuine editorial content/reporting and advertising strikes me as very depressing. It's what happens when the 'money men' take over newspapers and completely undermines what a newspaper is supposed to be about holding a critical mirror up to society and its leaders.

What credibility does the rest of the Times of India's content have if so much of it is plainly up for sale? This looks like a once great newspaper prostituting what shreds of reputation it had remaining for a few advertising dollars something in the current buoyant Indian newspaper market, I'm sure it doesn't really have to do. Sad.